Development log: the AI overhaul
August was about one thing: making the AI answer well, from one place, before anything else was built on it.
By mid-2026 the bot's AI had grown feature by feature: a help channel, a chat channel, a website chat, replies in tickets. Each had its own way of talking to the AI. An audit found six of them.
What changed
- One shared AI service now handles every feature, with a fallback across several models, so if one fails the next one answers.
- Reasoning models sometimes leaked their internal thinking into a public channel. That output is now stripped before anything is posted.
- Every AI feature was moved over one at a time, each one tested on its own.
Two rules that came out of it
Some features are the AI, like answering questions. Others work fine without it and the AI only adds to them, like a personal line on a welcome card. The second kind always has a switch to turn the AI off.
And when answers read like raw search results, the fix was in how we ask the AI, not in rebuilding the search.
Also this month
Tickets close themselves after a quiet period, giveaways got re-entry and claim deadlines, and crashes now report themselves.